Another Tool to add to your Group Policy Vista Troubleshooting Kit

Well I have been talking quite a bit around Group Policies recently. Well that is because I have been involved with some colleagues in putting together some material for a new Group Policy Course that will be hopefully available soon to Premier Customers. One of the tools that I came across in my research was GPOLogView.

Group Policy Log Viewer (GPLOGVIEW)

Group Policy Log viewer (GPLOGVIEW) is a tool that enables you to really identify what is happening when a Group Policy is run. This is a tool that was released for Windows Vista Operating system and is run from the command line. It is available for download from Microsoft’s Web Site.

Monitor Mode

One option that is very useful is 'monitor mode'. This allows you to run the tool with the -m switch and will allow you watch what is actually processed and run when you run GPUpdate from the command line of the Computer.

The output that this produces can be quite lengthy and in depth dependant on the number of Group Policies that are being processed. This file can be parsed to a text file by typing in the following command;

GPLOGVIEW -M >>GPLOGVIEW.TXT

See below for example of output from the above command. This puts the output into an easy to read format to allow you to identify exactly what Group Policies are being processed by the Vista Machine and facilitate your Troubleshooting. It is more readable than a Userenv.log file and exactly pinpoints the time and date of each action that processes a Group Policy from Start to finish.

(Beginning of Log)

Running in Monitor Mode.

SUCCESS: Subscribing to all Events from System Channel...

SUCCESS: Subscribing to all Events from Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy/Operational Channel...